Ghost Soldiers (23 page)

He looked back at her. She stood in the darkness, stars all around her head as if she lay back on a velvet celestial carpet. She didn't meet his eyes. “What if I kill someone innocent?”

“You won't. I'll always help you.”

“But what if I do? What if I do anyway?”

He stared at her for a long time, remembering the young girl Master Cade had forced him to feed upon. “Then I'll destroy you.”

“Nice. That simple, huh? Lines in the sand.”

“This non-life is dark enough without tasting the blood of innocents. That blood burns as it goes down. A vampire is nothing more than a never-ending collection of haunted memories, hunger and suffering. An engine running on blood, in the silence of an unbeating heart, drinking of shadows. I warned you, Bailey Fletcher.”

“Get over yourself.” Her eyes glowed with bright red fury, and her hands balled into fists. “Goddammit—get over it. Of course this sucks. Ha-fucking-ha! Somebody once said
Life is pain
—and that guy should've been awarded a gold star and a kick in the nuts. Everybody suffers. Why should we be any different?”

“I've done it longer. Guilt doesn't wash away. It layers your skin like dust. Or spilled blood.”

“Done it longer? So you're better at it. But I'd take a little taste of bitter in my morning coffee if it meant I existed to
taste
the goddamn bitter. The void is just that. Fucking empty. I don't regret clinging to existence, even if it's hard. Even if sometimes it's full of shit and pain and misery. Because there's always a new hour. Yeah, there's nothing new under the sun, but there's still a few beautiful things worth seeing.”

Her anger burned even hotter across their connection. “So shovel the self-pity somewhere else. I don't need to be slave to someone who broods like a gargoyle six days of the week and on the seventh he kills.”

“I killed a young girl once,” he said, watching her. She flinched, and he smiled bitterly. “See? You were human not long ago. To a vampire you're all little more than pigs ripe for slaughter.”

She looked down for a moment, and then seemed to gather her will and force herself to meet his gaze again. “Human is a state of mind.”

“No. The longer a monster, the more monstrous you become. You proved it when you forced me to Turn you. I lost my final shard of honor.”

Somewhere he heard the growl of a heavy engine, a truck working its way up through the gears. The city around him felt old, all the way deep down into the pores of its stones, the cracks and emptiness between atoms. How could cities not be haunted? They held death in their bellies and ghosts in their minds.

As did vampires.

“You killed a girl…” Her voice had lost both fury and indignation. Tears slid down her cheeks, but who she cried for he didn't know and didn't care. Her hands clenched again. Her throat worked, and he saw one of the muscles in her smooth neck spasm and jump beneath the skin.

“I stole her life and drank it.”

“There's something you're not saying,” she said. He felt her probing across the link, trying to read his memories. “Your Master…your Master forced you—”

“A part of me reveled in the taste. And my Master? I pinned him with silver spikes and left him for the sun. I made sure he remembered that night, that girl, and remembered what he'd made me do. But even though he shrieked for mercy, screamed his rage, begged and cursed and wailed, I'm not certain he
did
remember it. He'd killed so many people—young, old, women, men, children—by then that none of them stayed in his memory.”

“But you love,” Bailey said in a small, quiet voice. “You love Maria. And I can still feel love. As long as we love, then life, or this un-life as you call it, is still worth living. We love. We have friends. We can laugh, even if it's only in the darkness.”

They stared at each other. Silence spread between them, sound locked in glacial ice.

“I hate vampires,” a man said behind them.

Karl and Bailey whirled to see a man standing at the far rooftop ledge. His hair was pure white, his skin very pale. Eyes of purple-blue, but human, not vampire eyes. An albino. White beard scruff dusted his cheeks. A heavy cobalt blue cloak edged with sable fur draped his body, but Karl could sense the hateful aura of many holy symbols and silver beneath it. The man spoke again in a grizzled voice, like a hacksaw grating against rusty iron. “If you had any honor, you'd take a walk into the sun.”

Karl faced off with him, settling his hand on the butt of the Makarov pistol behind his back, hard stare striking sparks against hard stare. The vampire hunter had tracked them down.

“Erik Deor,” Bailey said in a voice numbed of all emotion. Her fear seeped across the link, utterly exhausted, a fox chased until it finally dropped and waited for the hunter's dogs.

Deor brushed back the folds of the cloak, clearing his weapons. He gripped a silver cane in his left hand, topped with a silver-bladed hatchet head on one side and a silver serpent head on the other. Body armor, Kevlar reinforced with ceramic plate. A black chain hung around his neck sporting a silver pentagram, a glowing crucifix, and a mandala, with more silver crosses on his neck guard. Silver rings on every finger, even his thumbs. Silver crosses glowed on his black boot tips. And dozens of derringers, .22s and .38s strapped all over his body in custom leather holsters.

A lot of damn silver.

“Bailey Fletcher,” Deor said. “You're called to judgment, Knight of the Thorn. Come with me.”

She stood her ground, squinting against the flare of blue-white light from the symbols. “I demand a Trial. It's my right.”

“You know your vows,” Deor said. “Hold your honor in your hands and come with me.”

Karl stepped between them. “She's not going with you, hunter. Guns or blades? Your choice.”

“This is Thorn business. But I'm also here to give you what you want more than anything else, Karl Vance. Unending peace.”

“No!” Bailey yelled, and her spirit wolf coalesced out of the air, dark energy swirling around and forming into a powerful lupine form. The spirit wolf crouched and bared its teeth. Black wisps of smoke curled up from its paws where it touched the roof surface.

Deor regarded her in silence with his purple-blue eyes. He didn't look at the spirit wolf, as if its presence offended him.

Karl drew Bailey's long sword, ignoring the searing, bitter pain of the silver burning against his glove. He pulled the semi-auto with the other hand and aimed at Deor's head. “I can't allow you to harm her.”

“She belongs to the Thorn. You have no right to wield that blade.”

“Come take it then.”

Bailey stepped between them, dismay on her face. “Erik, just let us go. We're not going to hurt anybody. Karl just wants to get home. There's a woman he loves…”

Pure rage distorted Deor's face, twisting it into a hateful pale demon mask before he regained control of himself. His gaze sharpened, cutting into Karl, his irises twin chips of amethyst.

“Love.” Deor's lips skinned back in a smile so feral he seemed more wolf than man. “
Love
.” He lifted the cane, staring down at the hatchet head. He began to spin it slowly in his fingers, the hatchet blade and the serpent head changing positions, orbiting one another around the shaft. “Did either of you feed tonight?”

Bailey opened her mouth, but no sound escaped. Karl only stared at him in silence.

“As I suspected.” Deor continued to spin the hatchet cane. “Your amnesty ended the instant you failed your contract.” He spun the cane in his hands, now gripping the serpent head, pointing the shaft like a gun. A trigger curved below the serpent, nearly flush with the shaft. The cane was not solid, but opened like a gun barrel with a dark .38 caliber eye.

Karl threw himself toward Bailey, knocking her aside with his shoulder. Deor squeezed the trigger. The gunshot was nothing more than a flat
bang
—a firecracker sound that hardly seemed dangerous. The silver-encased bullet missed by inches, close enough that he felt the wind-kiss of its passing. Deor spun the cane again so he held it like an axe, drew a derringer with his other hand and took aim.

Karl returned fire with his pistol. Deor jumped to the side—amazingly quick for a human—as bullets sliced the air around him, so close his cloak jerked as the rounds tore through it. The third shot caught him in the upper chest and sent him twisting off balance.

Bailey lurched toward the roof edge, but Karl threw out an arm against her chest and checked her movement. Her spirit wolf ran toward Deor. “Call your wolf back—”

Deor launched off the ground, onto a vent, and leapt toward them, all his silver gleaming in the city lights, his crosses burning. Bailey's wolf sprinted at the hunter, and its deep bass growl echoed in Karl's mind. Deor shifted aim to the wolf and shot twice in rapid succession. The flat clap of gunfire echoed off the surrounding buildings and alleys and back to them, a deadly harmony.

Bailey screamed. Her wolf staggered, thrown off stride, and midnight shadows in smoke form swirled from the two holes in its side, a black steam that seeped into the night air and dissipated into nothingness. Bailey gasped, clutching her abdomen with both hands. The wolf limped back toward her. She hunched over and cried out at the exact moment the spirit wolf loosed a long, mournful howl.

Deor landed in a crouch, cast the empty derringer aside and pulled another. Karl grabbed Bailey and yanked her back as she tried to run to her injured wolf. He returned fire, trying for a headshot. The increasing blaze of blue-white light from the holy symbols on Deor's armor made aiming difficult.

Deor sprang from his crouch, juked left and flanked them at a run. His boot heels crunched on the gravel rooftop. His heart beat fast with battle song, but Karl caught no scent of fear. Deor was the predator here.

Karl pivoted to keep his body between the vampire hunter and Bailey. Deor took aim again, and Karl met his gaze—burned his power to try and
influence
the man, to slow him and control him. Deor's steel willpower rose up like a sledgehammer and smashed through the magic as if it were nothing more than a thin sheet of ice.

Deor smiled and pulled the trigger.

Karl dodged again, falling away as he hauled Bailey out of the line of fire. The first bullet missed the top of his head by inches. The second bullet slammed into his left arm, just above his biceps, piercing muscle and scraping bone. He grunted in pain and tumbled. The pistol flew out of his hand to clatter on the rooftop as he landed awkwardly. Agony blazed deep inside where the silver slug lodged—a burning star shoved into his body, searing muscle and tissue. Smoke poured from the hole along with a trickle of black blood. He leaned on the sword, his lips peeled back from his fangs in a grimace. The agony drained his scream of power. Instead, it breathed out of his lungs like the silent wail of a ghost.

Deor walked toward them, the tread of his boots unhurried. He dropped the empty derringer and pulled another, steadily closing the distance.

Bailey sank to her knees beside Karl, hugging her spirit wolf. Her arms half-disappeared in the black smoke of its body. The wolf whined as it licked her face. She laughed—a sound that immediately wrenched out of shape and collapsed into a sob. The spirit wolf pressed itself against her. It merged back into her body as the torrents of dark energy keeping it corporeal suddenly cut loose. Bailey sagged, barely keeping herself upright. Her fear and anger flooded across the Master-sireling link, mixing into the sun flare of agony in his mind. He didn't even feel fear. The pain was too great for fear. It swallowed it up. Smothered it. Crushed it out of existence.

“Bailey Fletcher,” Deor called. “Come here and die with your head high. Like a Thorn knight.”

“Bastard…” she replied, trembling.

Karl, still kneeling, reached out with one arm and half-guided, half-pushed Bailey behind him. Deor paused, and his eyes narrowed. Something flickered across his face—too fast to read. He loomed over Karl—a huge pale shape with blazing stars at his throat, and surrounded by the shadows of his cloak—and he raised the hatchet blade on his cane high in the air.

The blade chopped down toward Karl's neck. Karl launched himself upward, swinging the sword in a short arc that caught the cane beneath the hatchet. Deor's eyes widened, and he sucked in breath. He grabbed for a derringer with his free hand, but Karl spun and rammed his knee into Deor's stomach. The breath whooshed out of him as he flew backward and hit the ground hard.

Karl took two running steps and leapt at the vampire hunter with his sword raised to slice the man open from throat to groin. Deor rolled aside and into a crouch as Karl landed, the blade just missing its target. He recovered instantly, pivoted, and thrust with the sword, ignoring the sickening agony in his shoulder. Deor barely shunted the blade aside with his cane. This close, Karl had to squint against the blazing light from the holy symbols. Deor reached for another derringer, but Karl closed with him before the gun cleared the holster.

Bailey screamed when she blindsided Deor, ramming her shoulder into his back. The animal rage and pain in her scream echoed across the rooftops as he went flying. His teeth clacked together with the sound of a penny tapped hard on a porcelain sink as he slammed to the ground and lost hold of his hatchet cane. Bailey threw up a hand against the brilliant blue-white glare, her fangs long and her eyes glowing a deep red.

Deor grabbed at his arsenal of pistols.

Karl jumped at her and pulled her into him, keeping the sword carefully angled away so as not to cut or burn her. He twisted around in midair to shield her as Deor opened up with derringers in both hands, capping off two shots, dropping the empty gun and pulling a new one. Small caliber bullets pinged and ricocheted all around them. Karl and Bailey thumped and skidded along the gravel rooftop, but they slid behind a tangle of ductwork and vents. Brilliant white-hot agony exploded in his arm where he'd been shot. Bullets sang as they hit the galvanized steel.